Slowwww music.

Topic

New Reply

Hello

My daughter uses my computer to play CDs whilst doing homework (using Media Player 9). Today she complained that it was playing very slowly. Sure enough, the sound was equivalent to a 78 playing at about 55 rpm. I cleaned the drive, tried playing it from the second cd/rw drive, tried other CDs, but no joy. No programmes have been installed and no changes have been made. Having just checked music from the hard drive, that is playing slowly, as well. Any ideas?

Thank you

Reply | Quote

Replies

Something is using a lot of CPU resources. What operating system are you running?

Joe

--Joe

Reply | Quote

CD Player as a performance monitor, what a neat idea! I knew there had to be some reason it was added to Windows because it’s never made sense to me to use a $700 (or more) computer to emulate a $100 (or less) boombox.

Reply | Quote

CD Player as a performance monitor, what a neat idea! I knew there had to be some reason it was added to Windows because it’s never made sense to me to use a $700 (or more) computer to emulate a $100 (or less) boombox.

Reply | Quote

Running WinXP Home SP1. Checked CPU with TweakXP Pro V2 and Task Manager, shows high (80%) usage of CPU whilst playing. Interesting comment (?) from calvincrumrine, as CDs have been played this way for years with no snags. For info, P3 1.2 with 768Mb RAM.

calvincrumrine, are you saying that playing music from the HD or CD drive is inefficient? because up until now, it has been fine.

Reply | Quote

Update.

Playing music from HD. CPU usage less than previous post. See screen grab fm TM.

Reply | Quote

What processes are using the CPU havily under each circumstance?

Joe

--Joe

Reply | Quote

What processes are using the CPU havily under each circumstance?

Joe

--Joe

Reply | Quote

The system idle process is the only process using CPU, with TM on 2 -4. Interestingly, after booting this morning the music plays fine with less than 10% CPU usage. The only thing I can think of is that maybe a day of ActiveSync and Outlook (with LookOut addin) usage was too much for it, and a reboot was all it needed to clear the decks.

As I say, this was the first time it had happened which threw me a bit. But now I know!!

Thanks for the assistance.

Reply | Quote

Might be worth checking if you have the Indexing Service running – that could account for parallel HD usage.

Reply | Quote

Thanks for that Leif, but I have Indexing set to manual. The only majorish change recently was to load .Net 1.1 for LookOut, a search tool in Outlook (very good, incidently) It (.Net) caused a few funnies on my computer for eg. changed logins, security settings…. and LookOut updates its search capability when the comp is idle. Apart from that…..

Reply | Quote

I’d suspect Lookout. Not only is it the one change you mention but also that ‘updates its search capability when the comp is idle’ makes it suspect. What does it consider idle? I remember screen savers that were supposed to activate only when the comp was idle-but it appeared that their definition of ‘idle’ was when the keyboard & mouse weren’t being used. They often kicked in when I had other stuff running-downloads, macros, compiles, etc. Anything that ran unattended over their time limit. I quickly learned to either turn them off or at least keep moving my mouse even when I wasn’t doing anything useful with it (other than telling the background software that the computer wasn’t idle).

Reply | Quote

Good point. Although Lookout does pop up a warning text box to say it is about to start its index activity. Music still playing OK today, only thing I haven’t done is PDA sync.

PS. Just as I finished the text above LookOut started its index!! CD playing OK but the CPU at 100%. Index took about 1 minute for 2300 files. Screen grab below. Sorry about quality.

Reply | Quote

Well, shoot. It does seem like Lookout has a poor idea of what idle means, but it also seems like they did a pretty good job of writing it so it wouldn’t get in the way of other things that were running. So now I have no ideas. Sorry.

Reply | Quote

Well, shoot. It does seem like Lookout has a poor idea of what idle means, but it also seems like they did a pretty good job of writing it so it wouldn’t get in the way of other things that were running. So now I have no ideas. Sorry.

Reply | Quote

Good point. Although Lookout does pop up a warning text box to say it is about to start its index activity. Music still playing OK today, only thing I haven’t done is PDA sync.

PS. Just as I finished the text above LookOut started its index!! CD playing OK but the CPU at 100%. Index took about 1 minute for 2300 files. Screen grab below. Sorry about quality.

Reply | Quote

I’d suspect Lookout. Not only is it the one change you mention but also that ‘updates its search capability when the comp is idle’ makes it suspect. What does it consider idle? I remember screen savers that were supposed to activate only when the comp was idle-but it appeared that their definition of ‘idle’ was when the keyboard & mouse weren’t being used. They often kicked in when I had other stuff running-downloads, macros, compiles, etc. Anything that ran unattended over their time limit. I quickly learned to either turn them off or at least keep moving my mouse even when I wasn’t doing anything useful with it (other than telling the background software that the computer wasn’t idle).

Reply | Quote

Thanks for that Leif, but I have Indexing set to manual. The only majorish change recently was to load .Net 1.1 for LookOut, a search tool in Outlook (very good, incidently) It (.Net) caused a few funnies on my computer for eg. changed logins, security settings…. and LookOut updates its search capability when the comp is idle. Apart from that…..

Reply | Quote

Might be worth checking if you have the Indexing Service running – that could account for parallel HD usage.

Reply | Quote

You need to check the processes when the music is not playing correctly. If there is nothing using the CPU or there is not an excessive amount of I/O then you may have a hardware issue.

Joe

--Joe

Reply | Quote

You need to check the processes when the music is not playing correctly. If there is nothing using the CPU or there is not an excessive amount of I/O then you may have a hardware issue.

Joe

--Joe

Reply | Quote

The system idle process is the only process using CPU, with TM on 2 -4. Interestingly, after booting this morning the music plays fine with less than 10% CPU usage. The only thing I can think of is that maybe a day of ActiveSync and Outlook (with LookOut addin) usage was too much for it, and a reboot was all it needed to clear the decks.

As I say, this was the first time it had happened which threw me a bit. But now I know!!

Thanks for the assistance.

Reply | Quote

Update.

Playing music from HD. CPU usage less than previous post. See screen grab fm TM.

Reply | Quote

Running WinXP Home SP1. Checked CPU with TweakXP Pro V2 and Task Manager, shows high (80%) usage of CPU whilst playing. Interesting comment (?) from calvincrumrine, as CDs have been played this way for years with no snags. For info, P3 1.2 with 768Mb RAM.

calvincrumrine, are you saying that playing music from the HD or CD drive is inefficient? because up until now, it has been fine.

Reply | Quote

Something is using a lot of CPU resources. What operating system are you running?

Joe

--Joe

Reply | Quote

I suppose you’ve checked the play speed in media player…View>enhancements>play speed settings then select slow, medium, fast.

Reply | Quote

Play speed is fine; thank you for the tip!

Tried multi tasking with CD playing/hard drive playing, although lose lots of memory(!), snag has not repeated itself. A useful exercise, though, in checking the system.

Thanks for all your inputs.

Reply | Quote

Play speed is fine; thank you for the tip!

Tried multi tasking with CD playing/hard drive playing, although lose lots of memory(!), snag has not repeated itself. A useful exercise, though, in checking the system.

Thanks for all your inputs.

Reply | Quote

I suppose you’ve checked the play speed in media player…View>enhancements>play speed settings then select slow, medium, fast.

Reply | Quote